Scaling Multi-Crop Threshing Machines for Women and Youth Empowerment in Tanzania

Rural poverty among women and youth continues to be a significant development challenge in many developing countries, primarily due to limited livelihood and business opportunities. These groups are particularly affected by the scarcity of rural enterprise options, lack of entrepreneurship skills and limited access to financing for both on-farm and off-farm businesses. Post-harvest loss remains a critical issue in rural areas, with losses ranging from 15-25% for harvested cereals and up to 22% for common beans. However, these losses also present untapped opportunities for employment and business development for women and youth, who often struggle to adopt mechanized technologies in their agricultural and business operations. Socio-economic and cultural barriers contribute to the limited uptake of such technologies, despite their potential to save time and labor, foster enterprise growth and create income sources. Therefore, expanding access to agricultural mechanization for women and youth, particularly through locally manufactured multi-crop threshers (MCTs), will significantly reduce grain losses, create employment opportunities, alleviate the labor and time burdens, and boost household incomes. The MCT can thresh more than nine crops including beans, maize, sunflower, green grams, pigeon peas, sorghum, finger millet, cowpeas, soy beans, lablab and pearl millet) and is 40 times faster than manual threshing.

• To provide multi-crop thresher machines to women and youth groups to generate jobs and save labor and time for producers

2. To strengthen the capacity of the service provider or manufacturer of MCT (IMARA Tech) to produce high quality performing multi-crop thresher machines, as well as technical support for business growth and sustainability

• Identify women and youth groups/entrepreneurs in the target regions in collaboration with traders, NGOs and other development partners
• Provide multi-crop thresher machines (MCTs) to farmer groups and entrepreneurs
• Train women and youth on operation and maintenance of MCTs  
• Enhance the capacity of the service provider through purchase of modern tools to enhance production of high-quality MCTs
• Implement an exchange program to build the capacity of the staff of the service provider in fabrication and learn new techniques such as quality assurance management 

Other Project members

• Radegunda Kessy ([email protected] ) 
• Atupokile Mwakatwila ([email protected])